The Free Software Foundation is running a campaign highlighting the “evils” of Windows 7. They highlight 7 deadly sins (of course) and they really make a compelling case against Windows 7. It’s a major shift for the FSF–they usually don’t get all political at this level.

Here’s the bad news: nobody cares.

Corporations that have adopted Windows and Office aren’t about to jump ship to Linux or the ever-elusive “GNU Operating System”. Too much has been invested in infrastructure and training. License fees have been paid. Sys admins have been hired and trained. That ship has sailed.

Small business may switch, but not based on this political action. That decision will be based on one thing and one thing only: impact to the bottom line. Any small business owner that makes this kind of decision without considering the bottom line isn’t going to be in business long.

I am a firm advocate and supporter of Linux. I use Linux every day in my job, both on the desktop and on servers. I have Windows machines, and I own a copy of Office. Why? Because it’s what my clients want. No matter how much OpenOffice touts itself as “Office compatible” it’s not 100% compatible. The differences may be minor and subtle, but when I create a report for a client and the formatting is messy because of the differences, it reflects badly on me. Not on OpenOffice. My client doesn’t care how I create the document. They only care that they can open the document in Word.

When a client asks for full functionality in Outlook, I can’t just tell them they should be using Thunderbird and Lightning. They’ve made a decision at the desktop level to use Outlook and I have to respect that. Now that they’ve made that decision, what’s the best way to give them the infrastructure to support it? Exchange must be considered because, while it may not be the cheapest or easiest answer, it is still arguably the best way to provide full functionality to the Outlook client. Linux based “free” alternatives to Exchange are still largely a variety of different services that have been integrated into a unified platform. If you can get them tweaked out properly, they work and work well. But they require a support infrastructure that’s often foreign to folks like my clients.

It could be argued that situations like the one above support the FSF’s contention that Microsoft locks users in and violates standards. They’re right, of course, but again the decision to go down that road has been made and altering course is often challenging and not cost effective.

I admire and respect the work of the Free Software Foundation (except for the whole GNU/Linux thing, but that’s a different rant). I wish them luck in changing the world, but trying to alter the course of ocean liners isn’t the easiest thing to do and may not be the best way to spend resources.